Accountability and oversight body removal being contemplated

Dec 15, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana will learn the hard way with this oil wealth that cascades into our laps. The mistakes of successive governments must alert us that we cannot go on repeating them. Yet that is what today’s PPP Government plans, as spearheaded by its Vice President, who searches for ways to dismantle checks and balances that stand in his way with the nation’s oil. The latest smart thinking from Guyana’s one-man political show concerns the key 22-member Public Accountability and Oversight Committee (PAOC) that recommended much-needed guard over Guyana Natural Resources Fund (KN December 11).“It is cumbersome…almost impossible to operationalise…” with “measures that don’t lend themselves to people understanding how it works.” This was what the scheming of Guyana’s oil Rockefeller concluded. So it now heads to the legislative graveyard.
The Vice President has not conducted Guyana’s oil business openly, instilling any confidence, and he plans to continue that trend. Successive governments have been of secrecies and corruptions plaguing this oil, from ownership of contract decisions to signing bonus to oil block giveaways to reports concealed. Guyana needs to halt this slide, with more eyes overseeing (not less), some degree of credibility (not none), and great openness on every aspect of this country’s oil management (not more trickeries).
For this is how we interpret and foresee what Guyana’s oilman is hurrying to get done through new legislation readied for parliament. The PPP Government and its leaders, seem to have a blueprint (more in follow-up writings) that replicates such schemes that strip layer after layer of oversight, and place such in their hands, directly or indirectly, to introduce more skullduggeries with this oil bonanza. When Government and leaders must make tighter controls and cleaner approaches to their mantras, they go the other way; they take away what is there, to smooth the path for corruptions more, monstrous than those seen before, by either PPP/C or PNC or AFC.
Our position is straightforward: we need as much oversight as can be had with our oil endowments, since trust for Government leaders, is virtually nonexistent. The record speaks to their crimes: crimes relating to oil money. Kaieteur and Canje, that should come to us (but don’t, may never do).
Crimes at the EPA in relation to protective measures for the environment and sectors depending upon it, (but which stands exposed and vulnerable). Crimes via removal of locks and layers—PAOC—that guard against the corruptions of insatiably greedy politicians and their handpicked teams of submissive helpers.
When this is our record with oil, it is vital that we don’t have less people standing over in constant alertness, but more of them. This gives Guyanese the best possible protections for the possible hoped-for, much-promised, maximising of benefits from these oil discoveries. In one sentence, the VP degraded civil society, GBA, TIGI, and others, that is; they lack the required relevant understanding of PAOC measures. Guyana’s one man-show knocks off others, as lacking.
Such a summary dismissal confirms what we often say, namely, that our politicians are shameless operators, who stop at nothing. Their handling of this oil proves it beyond a shadow of uncertainty. They want to get more, run faster with more tricks to remove hindrances that stand in likely opposition. This is where that thinking with the 22-member accountability and oversight oil body leads, meaning, that it is an obstacle that must be removed, because it doesn’t have what it takes. Thus, it must go, with the real reason unsaid, which is that it is a pain in the ass.
It would be one more layer of regulation removed and dropped into the trash heap, because it is what could holdup selfish politicians, who study what slows them down from gouging this oil wealth and devouring whatever stands against them. It is almost foregone that whatever smaller body is offered as a substitute, it will be littered with the willing and the weak, possibly even the wicked, because they will be at the beck and call of the dirty who put them there to do their corrupt oil work.
For they will be powerless and spineless, and all but meaningless, where robust oil accountability and oversight for the national welfare are concerned.

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